


to see the ocean

by CampionSayn



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Flash Fic, Gen, Powerful Klaus Hargreeves, Protective Ben Hargreeves, Protective Vanya Hargreeves, Sad Klaus Hargreeves, What-If, not compliant to season 1 or 2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:48:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26112916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CampionSayn/pseuds/CampionSayn
Summary: "Hey, baby sisterBen and I decided to go down south for the winter,maybe try a hand at modelling or that weird thing they do where someone paints themselves silver and stands like a statue.I dunno; anyway, I'll try and drop you a line when we get settled.-Klaus & Ben"
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 15
Kudos: 90





	to see the ocean

**Author's Note:**

> _"Who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night_  
>  With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares..." --Howl, Allen Ginsberg.

He survived for weeks and weeks off of coffee that cost seventy cents for a refill and apples stolen off of tree limbs hanging in the back alleys he stalked. He bled from open pores and his eyes when he pressed himself too far. He scared Ben more in his moments of lucidity than he would have if he'd snorted pure cocaine from a wet washrag and spoken to him about whatever entered his swimming head and made sense in delirium.  
  
Klaus didn't get too close to Claire, not matter how much he cleaned up and up and up. A job, an apartment, no drugs in his system, tattoos with white ink painting his back when he could afford it and slowly revealing to be sigils and wards and language Ben had read without true understanding, but Klaus knew like his own fear as the dead flocked to him more and more.  
  


* * *

Let's suppose that, because time and destiny get bored, something changes in _what could have been_ by something as simple as getting out of rehab a day early at the end of winter, a little over five years before the end of all things was supposed to occur...

Allison is three months pregnant when Klaus is walking across the street from a pawn shop he's prone to frequenting and Ben draws his attention to her making an announcement on some red carpet in Hollywood that wasn't the Golden Globes, but a close second Klaus couldn't be bothered to keep track of.

Ben feels somehow heavier and more sluggish than he has in a good long time. Years even.

Their sister is pregnant and they had to hear it through a shitty black and white TV set in a pawn shop while it was raining _(how pathetic and melodramatic could they get)_ and Klaus was in his usual frilled coat, smeared mascara and a pair of pink sandals he'd managed to hold onto in rehab where if he blinked once they would be gone.

It wasn't fair. How was it the family had come to this?

The Horror felt the bitterness in tandem with Ben's helplessness then, slithering out and about from him, across his torso and smashing into nothing while Klaus allowed himself to stand still a moment.

Quiet understanding stood between them as the tentacles worked themselves and Ben out as much as was possible in their state of death.

It took a moment afterwards, when Ben was panting without air, that Klaus noticed a crack in the window where one of the tentacles tried to hit _(did hit?)_ in their fury.

A breath later, Ben's dark eyes noticed Klaus digging sharp nails into his palm, with fading blue like phosphorous pulsing with his heartbeat.

"Huh."

* * *

Ben makes Klaus a deal two hours later after Klaus realized he wouldn't be able to get in touch with his usual drug connection due to the guy having gone to Detroit and gotten arrested stealing a car with the senator's daughter in the passenger's seat.

At first, the words left Klaus giggling, and then a fully cackling mess on the bench that followed the number six bus through to downtown, startling away a group of little old ladies that really should have been used to seeing Klaus by now.

Ben didn't feel much pity for them. Focus and very careful placement of words was his one shot at this; he did not want to blow it.

"Oh-hoh, brother my nearest and dearest," he sighed, draped along the back of the bench, long fingers fishing like creepy crawlers for a cigarette in his pockets, "And how would we get there? And what would we do there? I don't know if you've noticed, but I've never been one to wander too far from home."

"This isn't a home, Klaus, these are the streets of a city that we were brought to as infants. The only reason you stick around is because you care about the others and like to check up on them."

And guilt them into giving him money and a place to sleep here and there from time to time, but that needed no saying.

"Hey, now, I like to hang around to make sure they know I'm not dead in the gutter, too. How would they sleep at night, not knowing?"

They'd sleep fine, which pissed Ben off almost as much as hearing one of their sister's was pregnant via television, but he wasn't going to voice that either.

"We'll send them a postcard."

* * *

And they did.

Luther's, miracle of miracles, never landed in his hand, even if he needed it at the time and it would have done wonders for his mental health to know that at least one of his siblings thought about him a little while he was healing from the serum and the trauma that came with it.

_(Pogo kept it in his small room, hidden in an old book and tried not to notice his heart breaking when Reginald told him to get rid of it without letting Luther read it once. Such a shame, since it was a depiction of the Northern Lights reflecting off the Polar icecaps.)_

Diego's came through the apartment slot he'd been sharing with Eudora for a few months, a piece showing off a pair of white tailed deer, but was mistaken for junk mail foisted on them by their obnoxious neighbor that suffered from white male malaise and took it out on them constantly.

_(On the bright side, it ended up being recycled into mulch for the community gardens.)_

Vanya's, because the universe was on a roll with the most down and out siblings, was the only postcard to make it into hand. Quite literally, as the mail lady caught her on the way to rehearsal and made a comment that was probably meant to be kind but came out as a tad judgmental.

On one side, a fully detailed image of Disney's Rapunzel's tower; on the other, a very short message that got Vanya's heartbeat up regardless of intent,

_"Hey, baby sister_  
_Ben and I decided to go down south for the winter,_  
_maybe try a hand at modelling or that weird thing they do where someone paints themselves silver and stands like a statue._  
_I dunno; anyway, I'll try and drop you a line when we get settled._  
_-Klaus & Ben"_

She spent the entire rehearsal on fire, actually impressing the conductor and the first chair, but probably only because she wasn't worried at all about screwing up or fiddling with her music sheets. She was too worried and hyped up, not thinking at all, spacing out, and unaware that, for a moment, her medication was waning from the adrenaline that almost never entered into her system.

* * *

They ended up walking to Hollywood because Klaus has no money but the stuff he'd managed to squirrel away in various hiding spots back home and if left to chance, he'd find a way to sniff out a dealer at any given Greyhound station and blow it all on shitty poppers and weed that was doubtlessly third-rate at jacked up prices in the boonies.

They do not end up hitchhiking in the traditional sense of the word, because Klaus is sketchy looking on a good day and even with all the hero training bullshit Reginald put them through, if he got into the wrong car or truck at the wrong time of night, they were both under no illusions that there would be no getting away unscathed, or even alive.

Plus, there was the sweating from withdrawals and the vomiting every hour or so, filled with the water and saltines Ben kept nagging Klaus to take so he wouldn't pass out on the side of the highway.

For what it was worth, though, Klaus and Ben could both appreciate the scenery when they managed to catch a lift on a cargo train that got them through Colorado all the way into Santa Fe before Klaus had to run from some very unpleasant bikers with matching tattoos of the skinhead variety.

"Please don't hum the soundtrack to Newsies anymore, I _beg_ of you," Ben groaned, Klaus limping along a dirt road with cows looking over at him once or twice before deciding he was much less interesting than the calves trotting around, or the clumps of dandelions spread at their feet.

Klaus had thoroughly ignored him, happily continuing with _"Santa Fe, are you there? Do you swear you won't forget me~"_ in concert with taking a bite from the disgusting looking "Backroads Pizza" he'd bought at an outpost diner that looked a small breeze away from falling over. But it was fine, Ben supposed, as long as Klaus kept moving since he wasn't a hundred percent certain those bikers didn't consider the back roads and wilderness "their territory" as well.

Better to not let Klaus linger anywhere he could get his scrawny ass kicked where there was no Diego to be available if their brother ended up in the hospital.

* * *

The sun hurt everything of Klaus it touched, the last ounces of a high long gone days before they crossed over into California and his rage not unlike a snake tripped over by a live wire even by Ben trying to lift his opinion of their situation with a poor man's joke about a man from Nantucket that usually at least made him snort ugly and real.

Ben would have to watch his brother maneuver this new territory, different and yet similar to the darker state of being anyone in his position had ever been in from one end of the country to another.

Finding food in dumpsters that didn't immediately cause him to spit and choke, looking into openings in shelters, hooking up with men willing to pay for a moment-even an hour, sometimes-of company before giving over cash that Klaus and Ben would have to keep precariously close to the breast with the hope that fag-hating bullies didn't pick Klaus as a target.

And when all of that failed, wandering like a lost, displaced animal into the parks, ditches, abandoned tunnels to find a place out of the sun and elements to find a bit of sleep. Peace? Never, but Ben would guard his brother the best he could, curled up in a ball; hating himself for putting Klaus through this to satisfy his own curiosity and need to be connected with more than one person.

* * *

Klaus, by some miracle, gets a job as a waiter for a tiny coffee shop while they're staying at The Y, saving up money in the smallest of increments that Klaus doesn't use to eat crappy take-out or buy cigarettes that actually smell more pleasant. Ben knows that it's money that will either get them a ride home where the rest of their siblings reside in the shadow of the Umbrella Academy in the end of this little venture, or will start him off when Ben's part of The Deal kicks in.

The owner of the place doesn't mind Klaus wearing only three sets of clothes, including two skirts that were getting worn on the hem and heels that made Ben feel dizzy just looking at them. The patrons only give Klaus a hard time one in every twelve individuals. There's a radio they pay attention to when they can't afford a newspaper telling them how far along Allison is in her pregnancy.

Not that they needed Allison to be their _tick-tock_ , with Klaus rarely sleeping and the bags under his eyes growing steadily every day, with the ghosts of the west coast noticing him like seagulls noticing food the tourists leave out on the boardwalk.

Twice a week, Klaus goes to the strip clubs for amateur night and makes more money than he does at the coffee shop in a week. That money is spent on nothing, sitting in a secondary account, steadily rising as Klaus gets better at selling something as simple and terrifying as his own body without hands leaving finger marks on him and the cheers echoing to tune out the screaming ever present in his ears.

Ben doesn't pretend to like this arrangement.

But Ben is getting more solid and he's already managed to hold his brother's hand on really bad days seven months into Allison's getting heavy.

Ben's dead, patience isn't entirely beyond reach, coupled with something like hope.

* * *

Klaus has never known love. There was affection running in his veins since he was old enough to realize that he did not like the thought of Ben crying alone in his room with whatever lay under his flesh causing him fear and self-loathing. Even less the idea that Reginald would not allow for Klaus, or anyone else, to offer up a hand to hold or company of another person.

So it comes as a soft, creeping surprise when Ben tells him that he thinks, "Claire can see-- ...Ghosts," with a smile that could light up New York under smog, and Klaus realizes that sometimes Disney movies are completely right about certain emotions.

He can't say he's exactly _happy_ that Claire might be stuck with something that has basically ruined his life _(no matter what Ben says or represents)_ and often makes him want to jump off a bridge, but he's always been very good at putting other people before himself.

So when he's not working at the coffee place or spending Saturday nights at a bar where he makes excellent money pole dancing and stripping for mixed crowds, he goes to old book stores and libraries and looks into the occult sections.

His perusal leads him down routes that Reginald certainly never voiced the idea of using. Tarot reading, Santeria, demonology, alchemy, astral projection, cleromancy, shamanism, bibliomancy, banishing spells; some lead to nothing and some taught him more than the man who bought him as an infant ever could.

Of course, he also checked out just regular old fiction and non-fiction books for Ben as well. Working harder and harder to make his brother solid meant allowing him smaller pleasures than just allowing him enough of Klaus's energy to wander over to Allison's to observe and follow the family around while Klaus was stuck on the outside of their gated community, often taking up the e-cigarettes he'd become partial to and puffing out Unicorn Milk flavored smoke while he lay inside a water pipe; legs dangling out for the curious rabbit or snake to gaze at from time to time.

The first time Ben came back and Klaus was finished trying to read through a book on psychonautics _(with little to no success; **fuck all,** the language in that thing was a nightmare)_ and trying to wind down his headache with a cup of black coffee, it was to find _Watership Down_ , the old _Little Nemo_ comic master collection, and _Lord of the Flies_ set out for him.

If Klaus felt his eyes sting with salt water when Ben became solid to hug him, he was fine with it.

* * *

Blood was a key; and a very useful key at that. Something like a skeleton key.

Goat, rabbit, sow and deer; so many butchers in California offered it up and it was such a useful ingredient for the Other Side that Klaus actually paused once when making a blood pancake to laugh at getting one over their old bastard daddy dearest in creativity. Then he penned down the recipe on a postcard to Vanya to tell her he'd gotten an apartment with an actual real landline; the number jotted down with Ben's hand, "You have chicken scratch words, I'll not have you mess up giving her our phone number!"

_"One year sober, yay~_  
_Drop us a line if you feel like it. It'd be nice to hear how our baby sister is doing in her orchestra and etc._  
_-Klaus & Ben."_

Neither of them expected anything of it, of course they didn't. But then they got something for their trouble and sympathy and it changed things down the line; though neither of them knew it for years _(at least, not the most important stuff, they didn't know, couldn't even fathom)._

The phone, an ugly pink thing that the thrift shop attendant told them was from one of the model houses on the hill that got rid of it because it was out of fashion, rang one-two-three before Ben had picked it up while Klaus was in the bath _(water hyacinth, river mud, smooth rocks off the coastline from various visits Klaus took them on when the weekend came and neither of them could stay reading for very long, and tiny fish that were pitch black)_ trying to focus on a new technique he'd pricked and bloodied his fingers for.

"Hello, residence of the Four of Swords and Six of Cups," he spoke with a smile, still reading from the Amy Poehler memoir he'd checked out three days earlier and not really paying attention to the caller ID, "Who may I ask is speaking?"

"...Ben?"


End file.
